Tuesday, 7 January 2014

Sentences in ‘Doctor Zhivago’ by Boris Pasternak

The grassy smell of earth and young greenery made your
head ache, like the smell of vodka and pancakes in the week before Lent. (page
84)

The book fills up effortlessly with resonant descriptions.
Having only this week started a book the plot of which I have known for over
forty years, it is these close descriptions, together with the internal
thoughts of the main characters, that stun with their immediacy. Here, for
example, is an analogy that isn’t an analogy, more like an opportunity to raise
up the evocation, for indeed nature and religion are at one in this seasonal
image. Where else but Russia? we think And its reality of “vodka and pancakes”
only enriches the nostalgia. We observe Lent at the end of the sentence,
wondering in anticipation whether the church seasons will be mentioned in the
same intimate way after the Revolution in 1917, or if they will be slowly
replaced in the narrative by other ways of marking out time. Only by reading
the book will we find out.

There he had command of a detachment of semi-invalids,
whom equally decrepit veterans instructed in the mornings in a drill they had
long forgotten. (page 133)

Chekhovian humour infuses the book, something I did not
expect in quite such abundance, having only the film in my head. This one
sentence vignette of some minor parade ground behind the main German-Russian
frontline, is simply too absurd not to be true. In a single stroke Boris
Pasternak shows the uselessness of the Russian war effort. The image is both a
microcosm of the futile position of the men and a symbol of the macrocosm of
the Russian Army itself, impossibly underprepared and reliant on outdated
skills.

That June in Zybushino the independent republic of
Zybushino, which lasted for two weeks, was proclaimed by the local miller
Blazheiko. (page 155)

Ditto this bizarre claim on history, made after Moscow
withdraws from the War and before the Revolutions of 1917 transform the
country. Such is the state of flux and excitement, wonder and dread overtaking
Russia, a statelet like Zybushino can be declared, Pasternak asserts, and
survive for some weeks without any authority being able to uphold or suppress
it. Zybushino is no more than a depot town for grain, somewhere in Russia or Ukraine,
yet the locals (Bolsheviks or Mensheviks or Whoever) turn it into the prototype
for a soviet. Presumably the Communist authorities in the 1950s did not want
people to be reminded that such ludicrous pretensions could and did occur. The
idea of Zybushino, ‘the mouse that roared’, is the sort of comic invention that
must have been read with raised eyebrows by the comrades in the Kremlin. Is
Blazheiko a hero or a fool? He could be both, or even neither, depending on how
you care to apply interpretation. Is he an innocent Pasternak figure, or a
puppet of sly satire?

The attack on the middle class is already well underway when
Zhivago returns to Moscow after the revolution. The family has given over the
‘superfluous’ downstairs of their home to an Agricultural Academy and finds
ways of adjusting to this intrusion on their lives by adopting the propaganda
language of the new rulers. The implication of ‘superfluous’ is that necessity
alone dictates how people will live their lives. Anything judged bourgeois can
be dispensed with, even if that means coercive action by the state authorities.
Creature comforts can go, yet in this sentence we see that feelings and
expressions may be treated as material possessions in the same way as furniture
and homes. Too much of the wrong kind of feelings and expressions can be judged
‘superfluous’ by the authorities and, as we know, this became the case a decade
later.

Alongside well-dressed rich people, Petersburg
stockbrokers and lawyers, one could see – also recognized as belonging to the
class of exploiters – cabdrivers, floor polishers, bathhouse attendants, Tartar
junkmen, runaway madmen from disbanded asylums, small shopkeepers, and monks.
(page 256)

The class of exploiters in carriage 14 of the train to the
Urals is a cross-section of the predictable and unpredictable. While we expect
stockbrokers and lawyers to be enemies of the people, the Bolshevik propaganda
makes that explicit, the rest of the list is tenuous, if not contradictory. The
class of exploiters, we are being told, consists of anyone the revolutionaries
decide is an exploiter, or an enemy of the people. Anyone, in fact, could
anytime soon be branded an enemy, including any of the Bolsheviks themselves.
Little wonder the leaders of the revolution were paranoid. Cabdrivers, floor
polishers and bathhouse attendants were all minor jobs that maintained the
status of the middle class. A Tartar junkman may be there because he sold goods
for profit (ditto small shopkeepers) or just because he was a Tartar. We can
guess that the revolution broke up the charities of asylums, having no use for
madmen. Monks make the list because they were, in dialectical materialist
terms, of no earthly use and exploiters for generations; that this shows a
complete lack of knowledge about monastic vows, is neither here nor there. The
doctor and his family have an allotted bunk (something not shown in the film,
where everyone scrambles for a place in the carriage), which can be read as a
small irony. We assume that doctors too are from ‘the class of exploiters’,
given that Zhivago is here in carriage 14, yet the novel rides on the
unexpressed tuth that any society depends on its doctors. The old regime needs
doctors at the battle front, the revolutionaries need doctors in the civil war.
Doors will open for Zhivago because he serves life, an end that in any
circumstances no one can deny without denying someone’s life. As we learn, this
is driven not just by idealism but by necessity.

Mischief and hooliganism were counted as signs of the
Black Hundred in Soviet areas; in White Guard areas ruffians were taken for
Bolsheviks. (page 386)

In other words, uncontrollable violent behaviour was typical
of all sides in the civil war following the revolution. For those who did not
take sides, each side may as well have been as bad as the other. Yet all sides
wish to claim their own violence as simply the necessary end for the salvation
of Russia. The short Part Ten (‘On the High Road’) depicts people in Siberia
caught in the midst of this upheaval. No one is left untouched by the mayhem of
words and actions, as each side battles to take advantage of a situation in which
the old regime no longer controls society. While making every attempt to be
realistic, Pasternak succeeds in presenting scenes that are by turns horrible,
pathetic, absurdly comic, and hallucinatory. Without inviting the reader as
such, Pasternak nevertheless causes us to ask how we ourselves would respond to
such unstable social conditions, where anything you said or did now could be
your reprieve or death sentence tomorrow.

What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious
feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to
see nothing around one! (page 453)

Although this is Zhivago’s response to seeing Reds posters
in Yuriatin on his return from forced revolutionary service, one can hear the
same complaints rising up all through the seventy years of Soviet rule. It is a
response to propaganda, the same repetitious phrases and directives. The
disconnect with reality is galling for those who must live with the enforced
changes and are powerless to influence them. Pasternak is describing the same
feelings many Russians would have felt in the forties and fifties when these
lines were composed. Nothing was to change. Given such heartfelt rejection of
the Party’s modes of communication, it is not surprising the Party experts saw
Pasternak’s book, in passages like this, as a direct attack on their work.
Something had to give. When we hear Zhivago’s protestwe intuitively hear as well the cry for a language that is not
raving, delirious, feverish. He desires a world of new themes and knowledge,
i.e. in the language used by Pasternak in this book.

To be occupied with it alone is the same as eating
horseradish by itself. (page 482)

Lara and Yuri agree that philosophy by itself is simply not
living. They are talking in the lucid chapters of conversation after they are
reunited. These chapters are themselves a change from the sort of novel that
has lovers caught up in lovemaking to the exclusion of all else; they are a
climax of emotional and intellectual rapport between the two, and Pasternak
certainly built the tension before their reunion. Real relationships are about
commonality. They agree, for example, that “philosophy should be used sparingly
as a seasoning for art and life,” and will not read books devoted entirely to
philosophy. Finding themselves brought together again in the midst of vicious
civil war, Lara and Yuri hold out against the diminishment of life brought
about by people who are all philosophy, and nothing else.

In a sweeping script, taking care that the appearance of
the writing conveyed the living movement of his hand and did not lose its
personality, becoming soulless and dumb, he recalled and wrote out in gradually
improving versions, deviating from the previous ones, the most fully formed and
memorable poems, ‘The Star of the Nativity’, ‘Winter Night’, and quite a few
others of a similar kind, afterwards forgotten, mislaid, and never found again
by anyone. (page 517)

A surprise shock ends this sentence describing Zhivago, as
he writes his poetry through the night at Varykino. None of the poetry at the
end of the book will ever be saved or read by anyone. The spectre of Osip
Mandelstam and the poets of the Stalinist age rises up before us: ‘never found
again by anyone.’ In his subordinate clauses Pasternak tracks the process of
poetic composition in loving detail, only to end the sentence with the
desolating conclusion that none of this work will ever reach its potential
reader. We read the poems at the end of the novel, but within the frame of
reference of the story itself none of these poems survive. We read poems lost
in time. This long sentence is a premonition of more to come, for we are made
aware that like the destiny of the poems, the people associated with the poems
will also, likely as not, be ‘forgotten, mislaid, and never found again by
anyone.’ The sentence anticipates the startlingly brief summary of Lara’s fate
just before the Epilogue.

People from the sidewalks came over to the little group
around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been
run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. (page 582)

At the very moment when Zhivago dies of a heart attack on a
city tram, Pasternak does Chekhov. The internal life of Zhivago has been
expansive and courageous, we have read much and will find more in the poems at
the end of the book. But his own end is prosaic and surrounded by cynicism and
blank looks. Like everything else that happens in the shocking section called
‘The Ending’, Zhivago’s death is a final humiliation. Pasternak places us in
the midst of anonymous city life, where immediate compassion is scarce. This is
not the end, family and friends will come to mourn and remember. But it is the
end in the same way that so much of the novel is told, with a mixture of cruel
irony and matter-of-fact reportage. The poetry is going on inside those we have
come to know.

As swarms of midges in summertime

Fly towards a flame,

Snowflakes flew from the dark outside

Into the window frame.

(page 635)

Here is one of several uses in the poems of the image of a
window. It is verse two of ‘A Winter Night’. Russia is a country of windows.
The eye trained to read icons will view the image in a window frame with
particular attention. Since starting these sentences I have watched the David
Lean film again on DVD. How irregular it is to the story in the book, an
interpretation rather than a deliberate retelling. And one of the cinematic
motifs is his own use of the window. This makes sense coming from a maker of
millions of little windows, but one wonders if Lean has not pondered windows
while reading the poems. They serve numerous purposes in the film. Zhivago’s
half brother watches the orphan girl come to his office at the hydro-electric
plant, an office all windows. As a young boy, Zhivago gazes through a blue
window after his mother’s funeral. As a young man he steps through the upstairs
glass doors of his townhouse to witness the march and subsequent massacre of
worker protestors. Soon after he witnesses, though double panes of interior
glass, an argument between Lara and Komarovsky, thus discovering their
tormented secret relationship. Zhivago watches the moon from the little window
in the train carriage, free for a while to contemplate something other than his
companions, especially the anarchist and his ravings. There is the
unforgettable wall of ice at the carriage door, an opaque window smashed by a
shovel to reveal the passing countryside of war ruin. At the dacha in the snow
Zhivago scratches at a window of snow flakes, only to watch them turn into
spring flowers, one of several visionary moments for the poet involving
windows. The film was made about halfway through the Cold War, at a time when
the outside world knew little about Russian life. The publication of ‘Doctor
Zhivago’ was the smashing of a window. What was glazed over suddenly became
crystal clear. The vast readership of the book saw how individual lives had
been affected by the unbelievable course of politics inside Russia. Lean’s
unconscious, or possibly very conscious, use of windows serves to identify how
Western cinema-goers related to his country. Scratching at the icy window to
see Lara one last time departing by troika across the fields, Zhivago knew
scratching wouldn’t work: the plate glass had to be broken to give him a clear
view.

All quotes here are from the translation by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Classics Edition, Random House, 2011)